potygen VS SQLPage

There was a saying that before learning postgres in depth, the db is just a dumb store of data for devs, once you spend time to learn the tools it provides though, most applications just look like a very thin layer on top of the sql.

There is so much more to rdbms (especially pg) than just joins - common table expressions, window functions, various views, let alone all the extensibility - extensions, custom types, even enums.

All of that can enable writing performant, type safe and very compact applications.

I am yet to see libs that embrace the elegance of it all - I’ve attempted this once - https://github.com/ivank/potygen but didn’t get much traction. I’m now just waiting for someone more determined to pick up those ideas - a client lib that exposes the type safety and intellisence at compile time and allows you to easily compose those sql queries.

I think this project has some ways to go to reach that though, but thankfully it is a step in the right direction.

OMG this is one of my favorite tools paid for it all the way back when it went out. Have used it so many times just to write documentation for things like:

https://github.com/ivank/potygen/blob/main/packages/potygen/...

ASCII is just so versatile and allows you to put nice graphics in places where one does not expect, making things more easily understandable.

I also wrote a parser (in typescript) for postgres (https://github.com/ivank/potygen), and it turned out quite the educational experience - Learned _a lot_ about the intricacies of SQL, and how to build parsers in general.

Turned out in webdev there are a lot of instances where you actually want a parser - legacy places where they used to save things in plane text for example, and I started seeing the pattern everywhere.

Where I would have reached for some monstrosity of a regex to solve this, now I just whip out a recursive decent parser and call it a day, takes surprisingly small amount of code! (https://github.com/dmaevsky/rd-parse)

I think getting support requests from consumers who don't know what they are doing is actually a great problem to have.

I have a project that allows building web applications out of SQL queries [1]. When I started receiving support requests by people who did not know SQL and were basically learning it along, I was thrilled. I was happy that my tool had a greater audience than I initially envisioned.

In any given domain, specialists are the minority. If the thing I am building is unexpectedly appealing to non-specialists, I rejoice, even if it means getting strange support requests. In the end, it helps me making the project more approachable and easy to use for everyone.

[1] https://sql.datapage.app

This article resonates with me. I do love "mildly dynamic websites", and have fond memories of my days hacking together PHP websites 15 years ago.

And what I am working on today might be called a bridge for the "dynamicity gap". I'm making an open source server to write web apps entirely in SQL ( https://sql.ophir.dev/ ). It has the "one file per page" logic of PHP, and makes it easy to add bits of dynamic behavior with just a normal INSERT statement and a SELECT over dynamic data.

If you do, please share the results of your exploration here: https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/discussions

We love to see what other people build.

Saving further clicks:

> SQLPage is a tool that allows you to build websites using nothing more than SQL queries. You write simple text files containing SQL queries, SQLPage runs them on your database, and renders the results as a website.

The 22-line "TinyTweeter" example at 28:45 [0] in the video is a good overview - perhaps better than anything currently on the homepage/docs: https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/blob/main/examples/tiny_t...

Also, based on a couple of discussions [1][2] it seems like SQLPage has the potential to combine well with HTMX too. The two projects definitely share a similar philosophy.

[0] https://youtu.be/mXdgmSdaXkg?t=1721

[1] https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/issues/84#issuecomment-19...

[2] https://github.com/lovasoa/SQLpage/pull/175#issuecomment-187...

I am currently looking for a solution to run automated tests on a sql website generator I am working on ( https://sql.ophir.dev )

I wanted to use hurl (https://hurl.dev/), but Bruno's UI seems to be useful while developing the tests... Has someone tried both ? Which is better for automated testing, including when the response type is html and not json?